Google This

A few months ago my daughter called me from Israel to tell me that when she did a search of this blog it came up on page 23 of Google.

I googled the blog today and it came up as the first entry.

SD

"R.Hillel used to say: If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I care only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?" Pirkei Avot 1:14

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Rabbi Steven Greenberg. He wanted me to respond to some questions. I promised that I would reply within a week or two. Instead of responding privately, I have decided to make my response an open letter.

Rabbi Greenberg asked, "knowing what you know now, and having lived through this difficult time, what facilities could have been in place that could have made a difference?"

For us, there was nothing in place to assist us. We had no one to turn to and no one who could help us navigate these uncharted waters. Our rabbi was able to briefly console us, but we have not heard from him since our initial meeting. When I set up this blog, I notified him that I was doing so and I told him to call me for the address. I am still waiting for his call, even though there are young men and women in the community who have recently come out. I had a heart-wrenching and tearful conversation with Rabbi Steve Greenberg. He was a great help, but all he could offer was his words. We went to PFLAG meetings. They have been helpful as we could see and hear how their lives became normalized within time. We visited a psychiatrist. She is helpful in dealing with coping mechanisms. But that's about it.

In spite of all of our efforts, we still came up short and in need of help. Some days we feel we are in a bad dream, and not a single day goes by when something triggers a thought that brings on a tear.

That is why I thought it important to start this blog to try to bring other parents into the open to discuss, share and understand that they/we are not alone. Our struggles are similar, our fears are similar, our shattered dreams are similar, our guilt is similar, our questions are similar, our questioning is similar.

It has been a frustrating journey writing this blog. There has not been a large response and there are days when I think that it should be shut down. I don't have to be opening up every emotion I feel to the world, to my children and to my son in particular. They don't have to know how I feel.

A few weeks before Pesach I received a few private emails through the blog. One was from a young man who was married and is struggling, another was from a young man who has not told anyone yet and does not know what to do, and another was from a thirtysomething man who asked me for help because it was about time that he told his parents about himself.

So I will keep this blog going a little while longer because there is nothing else in place for us.

What could have made a difference? A place, a forum where we could ask the questions and receive fair and honest answers. Where we could deal with the emotional aspect of our children coming out, as parents and from the point of view of the children. Where we could get answers to our halakhic questions without feeling shunned or embarrassed. Where we could just have someone to talk to.

My vision would be to have an organization that would have on staff a rabbi, a psycho-therapist and a parent. This particular staff should be straight because they are talking to straight people, but with a deep understanding of gay men and women. These people should be on call to answer the urgent questions which we have and give us the strength to start breathing again.

I hope this answers your question Rabbi Greenberg.

Saul David

"You can no more make amends for the damage your words have done than you can recollect the scattered feathers."

The Jewish laws that are most difficult to keep but are most commonly violated are the laws regarding improper speech or "lashon hara".

We are taught that the harm done by speech is even worse than the harm done by stealing or by harming someone financially. Lost or stolen money can be repaid, but the harm caused by speech can never be repaired.

There is a famous Chassidic tale that illustrates the danger of improper speech......

A man went about the community telling malicious lies about the rabbi. Later he realized the wrong he had done and felt remorse. He went to the rabbi and begged his forgiveness, saying he would do anything to make amends. The rabbi told the man "Take a feather pillow, cut it open and scatter the feathers to the winds."
The man thought this was a simple enough task and he did it gladly. When he returned to tell the rabbi that he had done what the rabbi requested, the rabbi said, "Now go and gather the feathers." The man replied that this task would be impossible because all the feathers were scattered in the wind. The rabbi continued to say that "you can no more make amends for the damage your words have done than you can recollect all the scattered feathers."

There is a mitzva in the Torah which states "thou shalt not go up and down as a tale-bearer among thy people (Vayikra 19:16). It is a violation in Jewish law to say anything about another person, even if it is true. The person who listens to tale-bearing is even worse than the person who tells it, because no harm could be done by gossip if there was no one to listen to it. It has been stated that lashon hara kills three people, the person who speaks it, the person who hears it and the person about whom it is told. (Talmud Arachin 15b).

In terms of my son, lashon hara is most relevant. Over Pesach, one of my daughters kept getting emails from different friends asking her if it was true that her brother is gay. The emails were too random and varied to be coincidence. When we returned home from Israel after Pesach, there were messages on our phone from people who we have not heard from in over a year. We finally decided to tell a family friend that our son is gay and she told us that she heard about it over the last few weeks.

After some investigation with our son we were able to piece the following chain of events together.
A female friend of our son was being asked incessantly by their mutual friend what the story was with my son and whether he is gay. The female friend asked permission if she could "out" him and he said it would be all right to confide in her. It appears that no sooner had this person heard the news, then she sent an email to whomever she knows who also knows my son.

Our sages compare a tale-bearer to a merchant. Not a merchant of goods, but a merchant of information. We live in the information age and those feathers are now scattered.

SD

V'ahavta Lere'acha Kamocha

"When we state that it is a mitzva to love people, this means that it makes no difference who the person is." - Sara Schnirer, founder of Bais Yaakov in Em B'Yisroel 2:75-78.

Yesterday I went to the shul of the Rabbi who we met with after my son came out. I haven't been there in a few months because of the cold weather. The Rabbi gave an interesting talk.

He spoke about love, specifically the love of a parent for a child. It was short and to the point and it hit home.

He said that R. Akliva's students perished because even though they may have loved each other, they did not respect one another. He went on to say that without respect, love is not enough to sustain a relationship. There has to be a balance, he stated, between love and respect.

He concluded his short drasha by saying that it is a parent's responsibility to love a child, but even if the child does not live up to the parent's expectations or even leaves the path, the parent must tell the child that he loves the child and respects what he is doing.

It is incumbent upon the parent to balance his love for his child with the respect due to the child no matter what.

SD

"And you shall teach your children on that day, saying..."

The last days of Pesach are rapidly approaching as I am sitting in Jerusalem with my family. We have spent the entire Pesach together. This is the first time that we are all together since my son announced to us that he is gay.

We spent a meaningful Seder together with another family. For this first time in many years I was a guest at another person's Seder rather than being the leader of the Seder. This allowed me the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the Seder, and the questions that are posed to all the generations present at the Seder. It also allowed me time to think about freedom, not only the freedom from slavery, but some of the personal freedoms we work towards in our daily lives.

There are no answers. There are only questions. The answers change from year to year and from generation to generation.

Before my daughter left her yeshiva for Pesach vacation she was handed a note from her madrichot. It read as follows.....

On Pesach we go out on a journey to find freedom. Not only the traditional general exodus from Egypt but our own personal exodus. In the searching for our personal freedom we must choose to leave the known and familiar - for something better and new. In one way or another we are all still slaves. We each have something we are enslaved to. Something that tells us what to do, what to think, how to feel. Only once we know what that thing is, only if we can define it, then we will be able to overcome it.

On a personal level, I started writing this blog a short while after my son told us he is gay. I felt it was necessary to start a dialogue with other parents who were finding themselves in the same situation. In setting this blog in motion I also set up an anonymous email address so that people who did not want to share their stories with everyone, could communicate with me personally. I have stressed many times that I am not a professional, just an ordinary father navigating uncharted waters.

I have been a little disappointed in the response and I have even considered shutting down the blog.

But maybe some good will come from this.

A few weeks ago, a young man started to email me. We discussed my son, how I felt as a parent and how I was able to handle and cope with the news. He was struggling with telling his parents. He had been finding the Chagim to be a trying time for him and he was searching for help in sharing his sexual orientation with his parents.

We had numerous emails back and forth and many hours spent chatting on IM. I left for Israel and wished him luck. I received an email from him yesterday telling me that he shared his news with his parents. A few minutes later I received an email from his mother thanking me for helping her son.

From slavery to freedom.

Saul David

You Don't Have To Be Wrong For Me To Be Right - by Brad Hirschfield

I recently received a book from a friend. The title is YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE WRONG FOR ME TO BE RIGHT, by Rabbi Brad Hirschfield. As I usually do when I read non-fiction, I turned to the index to see if the author writes anything about homosexuality. Please read some excerpts from the book.......

Here's another example of two competing truths. There's truth to the gay person's experience of opening the Bible and reading, near the beginning of the Book of Genesis, God's words, "It is not good for man to be alone." The Bible is telling us that loneliness, for most of us at least, is an unacceptable state. We could go even further and say the Bible is telling us that loneliness is a sin. It violates the story's fundamental understanding of what it means to be human, even to be a man. We are created to be in relationship, and that fact is taught before there's any discussion of whom we are to be in relationship with. The need for relationship is so fundamental that it supersedes all else. Before we knew that Leviticus believed it was a sin for a man to enter into a sexual relationship with another man, we learned that it was a sin to be lonely, so big a sin that God reordered creation to overcome it.

If loneliness is a sin, how can some of my fellow rabbis tell a gay man who is in a loving relationship with another man that what he's doing is wrong? Well, they can, and often do, point to Leviticus, where homosexuality is prohibited. The Leviticus prohibition is based on the truth that the ideal state of human relations is for people of different sexes to come together and build families. Leviticus is very clear about telling us how life should be lived so that we maintain order and things fit together in their right and expected places.

Leviticus is also concerned about the ways in which people coming together will lead to the possibility of their making more people. It is more concerned with the role that people play in being like God (creating human life), while Genesis is focused less on being like God and more on feeling like God (having a new creation to keep from being lonely). Leviticus plays out the possibility that we humans can act like God in creating new life and organizing it on the planet. Genesis seems more interested, at that moment anyhow, in our ability to feel like God, to look around and sense the incompleteness of things and yearn for someone with which to connect.

Leviticus understands sacredness as a function of things being in their rightful places, not of how individual people feel about where things are being placed. It's the difference between the classically trained French chef, for whom everything must be done according to plan because following that plan assures the best product, and the short-order cook who knows that as long as the customers are happy, it really doesn't matter if everything was done according to what she learned at cooking school.

While it's easy to be impressed with the chef, most people are more at ease with the cook because they know that in his own way he is genuinely concerned with making a meal that is right for them. The chef can always hide behind the rules, even if the customer hates the food. After all, he will reason, it's been prepared according to the rules, so it must be the customer's problem. We need both the cook and the chef, and I suspect that's also true of the insights of Genesis and Leviticus.

Some people will say that using Genesis to justify homosexuality is obscene, while others despise the so-called truth of Leviticus. But, like the two cooks, each possess wisdom.

Perhaps we need to stop pretending that there are positions that will satisfy everyone and get used to simply doing our best while admitting the price of the position that we have taken.

As we approach next week's reading in Vayikra, I think that Rabbi Hirschfield's comments may be quite appropriate.

Thank you.

Saul David

PS. Rabbi Hirschfield can be reached at www.bradhirschfield.com

"You are not alone."

Last week, my wife and I went to visit our son at his home. We have not seen him since he came out to us. It was time to see him again.

We spent a pleasant Sunday afternoon together. As we strolled through a museum, he and I discussed this blog. I asked him whether it bothered him that I was writing this blog. He replied that it was important for me to be doing this as a parent, and he understood the goal of this blog is to act as a forum or conduit for other parents to share their experiences.

He told me about an organization that he is involved in which is trying to help frum kids cope once they have come out. He told us about his friend who came out a few months ago. When I suggested that the young man tell his parents about this blog, he told us that the parents were in denial and have not accepted the fact that their son is gay.

Over dinner, we asked our son if it would be alright to tell some of our friends that he is gay. His response was "they are your friends, not mine, and you may do whatever you seem fit." This was quite a departure from the way he felt just five months ago. He told us that the people who are important to him know that he is gay and support him. And that is all that is important to him.
In spite of the fact that we only spent part of a day with him, we left him feeling that he is more relaxed and in a better place than he was six months ago.

So where does that leave us?

Since we were hit with the news five months ago, our lives have changed. We see less and less of our friends and we spend most of the week engrossed in our respective jobs. When Shabbat comes, we no longer invite any guests over to share our meals, nor do we care to go to other people's homes. When we find the strength to go to shul, we come home without staying for kiddush. Before Shabbat we have been taking murder mystery books from the library and spending the weekend reading.

And then the week begins again.

SD

The name of the organization my son referred to is called JQYOUTH.
Their motto is "You are not alone."
Their website is www.jqyouth.org.